Scrublands(20)

‘Does it still bother you, shooting him?’

‘Of course. Every day. Every night.’

‘Counselling?’

‘More than you can imagine.’

‘Do any good?’

‘Not much. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s the nights that are worst.’

‘I know what you mean. Didn’t they offer you a transfer?’

‘Yeah. Of course. But I want to get it out of my system here. Leave it all here, then move on. I don’t want to take it with me.’

More silence.

‘Robbie, why do you think he did it?’

‘Truthfully? No idea. But there are things that bother me about it. All the obvious “what if” and “why didn’t I” sort of things, they haunt me, but there are other things as well.’

‘Like what?’

‘There were a lot of people gathering outside the church. Maybe two dozen. He shot some and spared others. All the witnesses say the same thing: he didn’t go berserk. He was calm, methodical. He could have killed a lot more.’

‘You think he targeted those he killed, that it wasn’t random?’

‘Don’t know. No idea. But he didn’t shoot any women.’

‘And he was a hell of a shot, wasn’t he? Dropping Craig Landers from that distance.’

The constable doesn’t respond immediately and the men are left looking at their beers. Neither of them has been drinking; the once-frothy heads have flattened out.

‘Martin, there’s an old bloke who lives out in the Scrublands called Codger Harris. Go and see him. He can tell you about Byron and his guns.’

‘The Scrublands? What’s that?’

‘Shit country. Mulga scrub. Hundreds of square kilometres of it. Starts about ten clicks north of town. Here, I’ll draw you a map of how to get to Codger’s.’

Robbie takes a napkin and sketches out a route, warning Martin of pitfalls and wrong turns.

Directions completed, the constable drains his beer and nods at Martin. ‘I’d better get going. See you round. And don’t be so hard on yourself; you saved a kid’s life today.’





THE HEAT IS WORSE. YESTERDAY’S WIND HAS TURNED HOT AND UGLY, GUSTING in from the north-west, propelling fine particles of dust and carrying the threat of fire. The very country Martin is driving through looks sick: anaemic trees, spindly shrubs and, between them, more dirt than grass. He’s driven from the black soil of the flood plain into the Scrublands, a huge peninsula of mulga scrub where there is no soil, just the red granular earth, like an oversized ants’ nest. The land is elevated ever so slightly above the flatness of the plain, just a few metres or so, with its own rises and falls. The track is hard, corrugated and unforgiving, runnelled by long-ago storms and scattered with large stones; periodically the tyres throw one up to thump into the car’s floor. A track for four-wheel drives, farm trucks and hire cars. Martin takes it easy; Robbie Haus-Jones has warned him that not many come this way, that it’s easy to get lost among the erratic tracks and the featureless landscape; break an axle and it will be a while before anyone finds you. So Martin nurses the car and remains patient.

He’s not entirely sure what he’s doing here. The impetus to leave town has withered, the insensitive exchange with the boy Luke already losing its potency, already fading, soon to be consigned to some seldom-visited storeroom of his memory, to sit alongside his collected regrets and misgivings. Robbie Haus-Jones still wants a formal statement on the ute crash and Allen Newkirk’s death, but that only explains why Martin remains in Riversend, not what he’s doing out here, in this hellish landscape, on this godforsaken day, chasing the tendril of a story. Not the story he was assigned, something more elusive, more intriguing. Perhaps that’s it: the journalistic instinct is too ingrained, too much a part of him, compelling him onwards, even if he’s no longer sure he has the stomach for it. Perhaps it’s all he has left.

He passes through a fence line, rattling across a cattle grid. A pole on either side of the opening is adorned with the bleached skull of a cow, one rocking back and forth, animated by the punishing wind. Martin is pleased to see the skulls; he’s on the right track. He stops, takes a photo. Next he comes to a fork in the road, takes the left track. Another kilometre or so, and he reaches a five-bar gate. HARRIS, says the top sign. NO SHOOTING, NO TRESPASSING, NO FUCKING AROUND, says the lower sign. Martin climbs out, into the blast-furnace wind, opens the gate, drives through, closes the gate. Not much further.

It’s not really a farm, rather a semi-coherent collection of scattered structures, arranged as if dropped like marbles into a ring by some lumbering giant. The building material of choice is corrugated iron, crudely wired to wooden poles. The most rational structure is a cattle yard, roughly square, made of locally milled wood interspersed with some rusted iron fencing. The cattle yard is empty, of cattle and grass and any other living thing; even the flies have abandoned it. Martin steps out of the air-conditioned car, expecting the heat, not expecting the cacophony: the corrugated-iron sheets bang and squeal and shriek in the wind. ‘Jesus Christ,’ mutters Martin, wondering where to start.

He walks towards the largest structure, eyes narrowed against the wind-blown sand. It’s a crude sawmill, not used for years by the look of it. To the mill’s left is a more complete structure, albeit standing at a dangerous tilt and swaying in the wind. It’s a garage. The two wooden swing doors stand open, hanging from their hinges, digging into the dirt and holding the structure erect, like a house of cards. Inside the garage, its bonnet missing and its whitewall tyres flat, rests the carcass of a Dodge, its once-black paint turned grey and powdery, splotched with patches of rust like a pensioner’s hands. There’s a bitch with a litter of pups splayed across the back seat of the old car. The pups are suckling, but the mother is unconscious, imitating death.